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To be fair, the first half of 2017 has been largely uneventful. There were a few winter frosts, the occasional dumping of snow over the higher mountains, a few force 9 gales, the odd two-rumble thunderstorm but nothing much to get me fired-up apart from the selection on this page. And I've been rather busy - editing the geology book I'm bogged down with but which has improved vastly, packing and moving house (April-May), writing up my mineralogical research (several unfinished odds and ends that I'm pursuing when I have time), doing a few guided angling trips (see the fishing section of the website for more) and looking out for science-related paid work (anything to do with science interpretation), so I have to confess that in the absence of more impressive weather this blog has taken something of a back-seat. But making it more focused on the most interesting events - as and when they occur - is I think a useful change - so I haven't gone away as such but have changed my priorities a bit.
Frost offers all sorts of photo-opportunities especially on those mornings when a low-angle sun and wisps of fog join in to make some cracking landscapes, but the macro side of things is often overlooked. One morning in late 2016 I found these superb fern-like ice crystals, in clusters about a centimetre across, on the windscreen of the jeep:
On January 2nd, a clear night saw the New Moon and Venus dominating the sky. This shot was the over-exposed of three bracketed shots 0.7 stops apart and metered on the moon itself. Full Moon photography often uses the Moon 11 rule, which refers to the trick of setting the camera to manual, the lens aperture to f11 and ISO=shutter speed, e.g. at ISO 200 and 1/200 second respectively. Not so in this case, which would have over-exposed the lit crescent into a bright blob! I simply experimented - although many other shots ended up in the recycle bin, this one I quite liked:
A few days later, the near half-Moon rose on a clear afternoon and the red kites were out and about, so it was on with the long lens:
If I could have gotten the Moon in sharp focus with this close-by kite, it would have made a belter of an image! Given the distances involved, some major depth of field is required! Guess I could simply have pasted the kite over a sharp Moon image but that would feel like cheating...
On the snow front, the following two images summed up winter 2016-17:
Here's a weird thing. Just after I moved into the cottage at Forge in May 2014, there was a spectacular morning thunderstorm. Then there was nothing much for three years, until the morning after my final night there! A look at the radar and lightning detection online convinced me to power-down and unplug and I stood and watched this unfold. Thunder was getting louder during the taking of these shots and by the time I finished, lightning was striking through the incandescent clouds!
The lightning got very close with simultaneous thunder, but the storm didn't last long: it was an elevated plume-type storm, bombing along at some 40mph!
Moving was an unwanted interruption to my life but my landlord had passed away and his wife decided to sell up his properties for the sake of an uncomplicated life: can't say I blame her. The problem was that the move to Forge (also forced but for other, more complicated reasons) came hot on the heels of my mother's death from cancer and in the shocked state that I found myself in, I had simply grabbed a lot of stuff, boxed it and left it untouched for three years.
This time, I was to move into a smaller space and the whole business unhappily coincided with the trial of Ian Paterson - the guy who operated on my mother when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005. But the verdict came followed by his 15 year sentence and since that there has been a realisation that I needed to start to put that period of my life behind me - it was one of prolonged depression and general uselessness. So this time the boxes are being sorted through, a few at a time, and strict rationale is being applied!
The new place is on the northern flank of the Dyfi Estuary, is pleasantly rural and quiet and perfect for cracking on with such tasks. Ideally I'd only like to have the stuff that would fill a camper-van but I think that's a long way off. It would need to have a big trailer to accommodate the research rock-samples! They may not look like much to those for whom huge crystalline geodes are what rock specimens look like - but some are nevertheless extremely interesting and are starting to yield up important information, helped by the National Museum in Cardiff, where I am a Research Fellow. That means you can do work there but don't get a penny for it, but the upside is they have a fully equipped laboratory, so I can get thin sections made, examine them and photograph them using a high-quality microscope. Once you are able to start looking at stuff a few microns across, you can really start to tease the secrets from the rocks that hold them!
On the work front, I'm involved in a short job with the National Trust on the Llyn Peninsula, spending a couple of days collecting representative rock samples for a special display at their Visitor Centre at Aberdaron. I did the first day last week, then called in at Pwllheli in the evening to see if there were any fish around. There weren't - but towards sunset, this stunning sundog appeared:
The sunset afterglow was impressive too, taken on the drive home:
So that's the somewhat interrupted first half of 2017 in a nutshell. Hopefully there will be some worthwhile storms in the months that follow: if and when they occur, I'll hopefully be able to be on the case, so in theory at least, the blog will be updated again before the end of the year!
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